What do you think of when you think of museums? Probably something like this: Cool, dark hallways. Marble expanses. Antiquities and artifacts lovingly seated on velvet and firmly enveloped in noseprint-dotted glass.

That’s certainly the experience that over six million people per year expect when they visit Gotham’s curatorial crown jewel, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the most-visited art museum in the United States, and the second-most in the world, after Paris’s Louvre.

But what about the seven-billion-odd people who can’t find their way to Uptown New York each year? After all, the Met is the repository for over two million treasures, whose origins span the globe and the entirety of human civilization. Should access to this legacy really be limited to less than a tenth of a percent of the world’s population?

Asking this question led Thomas Campbell, the museum’s CEO, to establish for the first time a new leadership position at the Met: Chief Digital Officer, in charge of shaping the museum’s social, mobile and online future.

And answering that question is what led Sree Sreenivasan, longtime Columbia School of Journalism fixture and Chief Digital Officer at the university, to decide to accept the job.

“To me, the Met represents a shared history, not just for New Yorkers, not just for Americans, but for all of humanity,” he says. “I’ve loved the Met all of my life. I grew up around the corner from it. I spent my childhood playing in the playground that’s right next to it. And when you’ve loved something for 30 years, and you get the opportunity to find ways to share this thing you love with the world, how can you say no?”

Now, I’ve had the fortune of knowing Sreenivasan — who prefers to go simply by the more tweet-friendly “Sree,” and whose official photo shows him caught in the midst of sending a text — for nearly a decade and a half, during which time he’s established himself in the vanguard of advocacy for digital journalism, while launching and incubating incredible array of institutions, organizations and phenomena. He was cofounder of the South Asian Journalists Association and its attendant online community SAJAforum. He’s been a regular on-air tech pundit and digital guru for WABC and WNBC. He was a founding teammember of DNAinfo.com, the hyperlocal news startup backed by Joe Ricketts, founder of Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs. And, as Columbia University’s first Chief Digital Officer, he was tasked with developing a distance-learning strategy for the college, launching pilot projects with Coursera and other pioneers in the space, and expanding the role of new media within the classroom.

The common factor in all of this, of course, is journalism — a profession whose very name is based on the French word for “day.” It’s a practice that’s rooted in real-time, and never more so than in the branch that Sree has embraced, digital journalism, in which the news cycle is metered in seconds rather than hours.

So it’s a little shocking to imagine Sree moving from the high-velocity, constantly breaking world of journalism to the staid, stately, static milieu of the museum; a place where the past is preserved, rather than the present explored or the future unveiled.

“Well, I certainly wasn’t looking for a new job — I loved what I was doing at Columbia,” he says. “But I have this obsession with connecting the digital and the physical. And I gave a TEDx talk about how the future of every business is just that, blurring the lines between in-person and online. And they saw that talk, and gave me a call out of the blue. ‘Imagine the challenge — you can take this amazing collection and find a way to connect it to everyone in the world.’ It’s incredibly exciting.”

Sree points out that the collection isn’t just art and antiquities. “The Met has one of the world’s largest collections of baseballcards,” he points out — over 30,000, second in size only to that of the Baseball Hall of Fame. “It has one of the world’s largest collections of guitars and postage stamps. It has a huge list of unusual things that people wouldn’t generally know about. And they should.”

As of August 12, that’s going to be a big part of Sree’s job: Finding ways to use digital technologies to get more of the Met’s riches into the public eye, and to get more of the public to feel like they have a stake in the Met.

“People tend to think of museums as places full of things in cases, but they really should be living, exciting places,” he says. “Museums have an immense ability to help us stay connected and share with one another. That’s the hidden power of GLAM.”

He explains that GLAM isn’t a reference to the Met’s tony roster of patrons, but an acronym: Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums — all places where items are gathered together and made available for public access. And all of them, Sree points out, are being asked to change their focus from “things” to “experiences.”

“GLAM institutions of the future aren’t just going to be focused on collecting and exhibiting,” he says. “They’re all ultimately evolving into venues for interactive storytelling.

Which, not surprisingly, isn’t all that different from digital journalism. So maybe Sree’s latest move isn’t such a shock after all?

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TAO JONES INDEX

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